What was going on when I was born?

Programs that would help needy elderly people in New York State pay for prescription drugs have been proposed by Governor Cuomo and key Democrats in the Assembly and the Senate. Such widespread support virtually assures that some program will be enacted this year, senior lawmakers said today. There are more than 2.1 million people 65 years old or over in New York and they have become an increasingly potent political force in Albany. Several other states, including New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Maine, have programs. Others, including Illinois and Ohio, are considering them.

The soaring price of gold on Tuesday brought to grief three professional traders who held short positions in the gold options market. As a result, the Volume Investors Corporation, a member firm of the New York Commodities Exchange responsible for handling their trades, found itself in receivership yesterday. The exchange announced that it had suspended, for five days, the member privileges of Gerald Westheimer, his wife, Valerie, and James Paruch. The traders were suspended, pending a hearing of the exchange's supervisory committee.

A not-so- funny thing happened to Alexander Grant & Company, the nation's 11th- largest accounting firm, on its way to the altar to merge with Fox & Company, the nation's 13th-largest. Not only has Alexander Grant, a Chicago-based firm with 335 partners, become mired in the imbroglio involving E.S.M. Government Securities Inc., the failed Florida securities firm, but the managing partner of Alexander Grant's Fort Lauderdale, Fla., office has been sued for filing false audits of E.S.M. and receiving $125,000 in secret payments in return. ''This is the first time we're aware that a C.P.A. has been accused of taking funds from a client,'' said Arthur W. Bowman, editor of the Public Accounting Report, an industry journal. ''It's an embarrassment for the profession.'' 'A Black Eye' Roman L. Weil, an accounting professor at the University of Chicago, added, ''It will give Alexander Grant a black eye.'' And Harris J. Amhowitz, chief counsel for Coopers & Lybrand, said, ''It's a tragedy for Alexander Grant's partners.''

The number of New York movie openings since the first of the year is up nearly 50 percent over the similar period last year. Because of the volume, some exceptionally good films might tend to get lost in the shuffle. Therefore, the New York Times critics have sifted through the lot and come up with eight choices you might not want to miss. Vincent Canby's Choices ''The Purple Rose of Cairo,'' Woody Allen's dream of a comedy, began an exclusive engagement at the Beekman three weeks ago and today opens in 20 more theaters - so you won't have to stand in line forever to get in. Forever is a long time, but it would almost be worth it to see the enchanting Mia Farrow, as a waif named Cecilia, whose movie idol steps off the screen and into her life one day. The time is 1935 and the place a seedy little town in New Jersey, where Cecilia shares a bleak marriage with Monk (Danny Aiello), an out-of-work slob who regularly beats on Cecilia to demonstrate his high esteem. Mr. Allen, who wrote and directed ''The Purple Rose'' but does not appear in it, makes the fantasy a completely logical extension of reality. While Cecilia and her pith-helmeted, fictional lover, Tom Baxter (Jeff Daniels), wander around town and share a few days' idyll, all hell breaks loose elsewhere.

Hundreds of Israeli soldiers swept into a group of Shiite Moslem villages in southern Lebanon today, killing what the Israelis described as 21 ''terrorists.'' Two members of a CBS News camera crew died in one of the villages and a third was seriously wounded after they were hit by fire from an Israeli tank. An Israeli Army spokesman said the journalists, all three Lebanese nationals, had apparently been among a group of armed men in one of the villages. CBS protested the incident, telling Prime Minister Shimon Peres that witnesses had described the attack on the journalists and their ''unmistakably marked'' car as ''unprovoked and deliberate.'' (Page A8.)

JOHN ROCKWELL New York, like America itself, has long been obsessed with the present - with the creation of new things, be they skyscrapers or comic books or Broadway shows, and a less scrupulous concern for the preservation of the past: row houses, pop graphic arts or, to get down to cases, great American musical theater. But as far as musical theater is concerned, all that is changing fast, and this weekend there will be two rather different but closely connected events to illustrate the change. Each of the events celebrates a great composer of American musicals - Jerome Kern and Richard Rodgers. And each involves a man deeply committed, as musicologist and conductor, to the preservation of past masterpieces of American musical theater. The more grandiose of the two events is the ''Wall to Wall Richard Rodgers,'' a free, 12-hour collection of songs, orchestral music, film clips and symposiums at the Symphony Space tomorrow from 11 A.M. Although this is very much a team production, one of the collaborators is the conductor John Mauceri, who has long been concerned with the question of how classic musicals can be performed properly today.

For more than a year, a steady stream of Federal investigators has sought audience with Panagiotis Takis Veliotis. Though he was first viewed with skepticism, many visitors to his villa in Ekali, this city's richest suburb, have now come to believe that he holds evidence of vast corruption in the United States defense industry. Indications are that this may not be idle musing. Though Mr. Veliotis, a 58-year-old former manager of the General Dynamics Corporation's Electric Boat division, lives with the taint of having fled to his native Greece just before a 1983 Federal indictment on kickback charges, he posseses voluminous private records from his decade in the top echelon of General Dynamics, the United States' largest weapons builder. After months of Congressional hearings and Justice Department scrutiny, his status as a fugitive has become secondary to his curatorship of these documents, which include extensive recordings of his business phone calls. Investigators have found the cache to be an almost bottomless source of information about reportedly fraudulent activity at General Dynamics and the Pentagon.

Mayor Koch said yesterday that he was ''outraged,'' ''absolutely shocked'' and ''incensed'' by a Federal judge who gave a probationary sentence, rather than a prison term, to a city sewer inspector who pleaded guilty to soliciting and receiving bribes. The Mayor said such sentences did not deter corruption, and he also objected to the judge's saying in court that it was the job of the city, rather than the Federal courts, to fight municipal corruption. ''If the city administration decides that there will be no corruption in its departments, they can get rid of it,'' the judge, Thomas P. Griesa of Federal District Court in Manhattan, said when he imposed the sentence. ''If they tolerate it, there will be corruption.''

The Economy The economy is growing at a sluggish 2.1 percent annual rate in the first quarter, the Commerce Department said in its ''flash'' estimate. That is less than half the rate of the fourth quarter, which was revised downward to 4.3 percent, from the 4.9 percent reported earlier. Analysts said intense international competition hampered growth, as domestic demand was filled more and more by imports. They were particularly surprised by a sharp rise in a gauge of inflation. It spurted to an annual rate of 5.4 percent from the fourth quarter's 2.8 percent, but special factors magnified the change. (Page A1.) President Reagan said he was willing to discuss a compromise on the budget with Senate Republican leaders. (A1.)

President Reagan expressed willingness tonight to discuss a compromise with Senate Republican leaders on his 1986 budget. But he rejected any reduction in his proposal for the military. Mr. Reagan is to meet Friday with the Republican leaders in a preliminary attempt to seek a compromise between deficit-cutting proposals by the Senate Budget Committee and the White House. ''We recognize that others may have other ideas,'' Mr. Reagan said at a nationally televised news conference, the second of his new term. ''But now they've got something that we can sit down and talk about, theirs and ours, see where we come out.''

President Reagan said tonight that it was ''high time'' that the United States and the Soviet Union held a summit meeting in an effort to improve relations. Emphasizing his desire to meet the new Soviet leader, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, he brushed aside the notion that he was ''being rebuffed'' because he had not yet received a response to an invitation to Mr. Gorbachev to come to the United States. Mr. Reagan, speaking at a nationally televised news conference, said: ''There are a number of things - bilateral situations between our two countries, other things to talk about - that we're negotiating or talking to each other on a ministerial level. And that some of those could probably be further advanced if we met at a summit.''

FRIDAY, MARCH 22, 1985 International A U.S.-Soviet meeting is expected by President Reagan. Speaking in a televised news conference, Mr. Reagan said it was ''high time'' he met the new Soviet leader, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, in an effort to improve United States-Soviet relations, and he said he believed the prospects of a meeting ''should be good.'' (Page A1, Col. 6.) 17 South African blacks were killed when the police opened fire on a crowd of up to 4,000 black people near a southeast coastal town. Black activists charged that the death toll was higher than the official figure. The slayings, in the village of Uitenhage, constituted one of the worst incidents since 1960 of South Africa's racial violence. (A1:1.)